“Vanishing” by Marco De Mutiis

Title:

Vanishing

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2016

Medium:

Mixed media installation: one single channel video, two prints and one printed publication

Artist Statement:

Vanishing is a project on the role of data in photography, and the tension between visual information and hidden data of the digital image files. Created with custom software that writes historical data to the image exif code (names of victims of a terrorist attack, dates of bombings of a war strike, etc.), the photograph gets visually degraded while its data becomes enriched with the event information. This creates a hybrid document that reveals the complex ontology of digital images, standing between reading and seeing, coding and decoding. It makes the tension between visual output and data processing in digital images visible, it questions the notion of photography as a document, interweaving the signifier and the signified, noise and signal, requiring the viewer to open the file code to make sense of the image. Vanishing consists of a series of digital videos and digital image prints accompanied by small publications. The pictures are all appropriated images of iconic historical photographs, that have been “glitched” through a custom software. The intervention to the data file creates the visual loss of information, thus making the image visually degrading while at the same time making the information of the image richer. The original and the resulting images are presented with a small printed publication of the exif code, where the viewer can read the pixel data and historical information. Additionally a video of the process shows the performative act of the rewriting of the image.